N.Y. Highschooler Designs Low Cost 3D Printed ‘Mini-Brain’ Bioreactor For Zika Research

A 16-year-old highschool student designed a revolutionary new bioreactor with a thousand "mini-brains," said to help accelarate Zika research.

A New York high schooler Christopher Hadiono designed this technology. He put the machine together during a summer internship in the laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with neurology professor Hongjun Song, Tech Crunch reports.

The machine called SpinΩ can be used to grow miniature brains and it only costs costs about $400 to make. Before Hadiono developed the device, he approched his professor Song.

At first, Song ignored the first email of the student who was hoping to spend his summer in the lab.

"My thought was, okay, let's just wait. If he is serious, he's going to ask me again," Song said.

Song was only convinced that Hadiono was serious when he received two emails, a letter and a phone call according to Spectrumnews. So the professor filled out the papers and arranged for the student to stay in the school's dorm.

The professor thought that the student's intention was to help an odd experiment. But he was surprised that his expectation was different as the student mastered computer software for making machine parts using a three-dimensional (3D) printer within a week. When the summer ended, the student built a device that could grow hundreds of organoids, or also known as "mini-brains, the spheres of cells that imitate the layers of neurons in a human brain, and those organoids had became ready after less than four months.

Slash Gear reports that the mini-brains created by this device are now being used to study how the zika virus affects fetal brains and how it may cause microcephaly, among other things.

As of the moment, the machine is under evaluation by researchers before it goes into use. However, the potential of this device to speed up the research of Zika is high.